Grupo Alarcos · Conference paper · 2013

Towards understanding software process variability from contextual evidence of change

Tomás Martínez Ruiz, Francisco Ruiz González, Mario Piattini Velthuis

CAiSE 2013 Workshops: Advanced Information Systems Engineering Workshops · 2013 · 4 citations (OpenAlex)

Software development enterprises need to tailor their own processes before enact them in order to ensure that they fit both the organization and the project. This necessity has, to date, been solved by providing these processes with variability support. Tailoring proposals have traditionally been focused on solving the problem of managing the variability of processes in order to facilitate their adaptation. Process tailoring has not, however, been considered as a solution to a wider problem consisting of the organization, project, laws and some other influencing factors that change according to each project, a problem that software processes must confront if they are to be successful. In this paper we enhance a tailoring framework in order to tackle changes in the context level of the process, and this variability is considered to drive the tailoring of the supporting processes. As a part of the enhanced framework, this paper analyzes the OMG’s Business Motivation Model (BMM) in order to apply it to the characterization of the organizational units as a part of the context variation factors, and to link them with subsequent process variations. The proposal is illustrated by means of an application example, which is based on a real industrial case and which has served as a proof of concept. The resulting conclusion is that since software process tailoring depends on the process context, so understanding and managing changes in the latter’s drive variability in software processes.